The sceptical image
There are so many openings for scepticism (if not cynicism) in the contemporary environment of art in the university that seeing it exhibited was bound to lead to fruitful reflection.
The exhibition, The Sceptical Image, accompanied The Image In Question conference held at Sydney College of the Arts, and was billed as integrating creative art research into the conference. The show was an interesting collation of new work by leading Australian theoretically-informed art practitioners, all of them associated as students or teachers with university art schools.
Among the artists exhibiting were John Di Stefano, Merilyn Fairskye, Tanya Peterson and Ryszard Dabek. The conference led this integration with a video installation, ‘Madame B: Explorations in Emotional Capitalism’, by Mieke Bal & Michelle Williams Gamaker. Professor Bal, from the University of Amsterdam, has a long-standing reputation as a theorist and was also the keynote speaker at the conference.
If an image can be said to be sceptical, it may be because of the established ‘theoretical fact’ of a double-take internal to it. It represents something that it is not, and which is no longer present. From this feature can be built a logic of paradox around the image, in which it is never what it seems, pulling in all manner of art-historical, political and philosophical scepticisms.
So, as the conference explored, ‘scepticism is part of the life of images’,1 and the explosion of photography, film and video means we now live in an image-saturated, image-proliferating world, challenging the traditional complacency that seeing is believing.
John Di Stefano’s Merge and Register were textbook renditions of the paradox. Register, a series of large photograms, utilises the fortuitous misalignments of data known as
Installation view (partial) of The Sceptical Image at SCA Galleries featuring work by Tanya Peterson. Photograph Isobel Markus Dunsworth.
Merilyn Fairskye, MARCH, 2014. Two- channel HDV installation with stereo sound, duration 1 x 2.00 loop, 1 X 7:00.
